Not completely autonomous. If you got Dell's hardware support (let's say that they had you pop in a livecd when you call them--would solve problems with Windows as well), then that would be a major advantage. Dell doesn't much care what runs on the machines, as long as it doesn't cost them and allows them to have standardized software support.
Ethical concerns are different from security concerns, somewhat. If you can suggest a cheap way to increase security, you'll be very mildly rewarded or ignored.
Still, the requester should likely change jobs before any major security breaks occur, and not mention anything further about security.
Why do you need your clock set to the standard in order to access a server? I've seen that requirement rather often, and I can't fathom a decent reason for it. It messed me up when switching between timezones (can't log in from Seattle unless my computer's on New York time). Really, aren't relative times enough? If not, why can't the server send a packet offering a time to use in mutual dealings?
So, I'm writing a scheduler app, and I want to schedule a recurring meeting for 11am localtime. My OS gives the local time via a library call, localtime(3). So I:
- get the time for the event, currently, in localtime from the user
- find whether DST is in effect for that date and time and convert the date accordingly
- add an event entry every k * 84600 seconds, checking each time to see whether that date's DST settings have changed
- whenever the user accesses the event, convert back from UTC to localtime, paying attention to DST
Or I:
- get the time for the event, currently, in localtime from the user
- store the localtime time for the event and its recurrences, ignoring DST completely except for the marginal cases such as missing or repeated hours which I can probably ignore
- display exactly what the user gave me when the user accesses the event
The problem isn't the method of storing times, even at the hardware level (that is, if the CMOS clock uses localtime, UTC, a nonstandard epoch, or whatever). It's that Microsoft released a patch for the new DST rules very shortly before they came into effect. If the patch were in place a year ago, the effects would be minimal at worst.
Mine does the same. Spoofing MACs is quite common, but it gets the less technical users to get Windows updates at least once a semester. I'd prefer it if the scanning tool required you to turn automatic updates on, though, and if students were encouraged to use the managed Symantec client that updates its own definitions. Still, the current system is much better than nothing.
My university uses a Sun server for mail. To set mail forwarding, ssh in and run the forward_mail script (or just edit your.forward file). Took them ten minutes to create the script, ten to write the documentation. UNIX isn't defective by design, but in exchange, you have to take care of the hardware.
I imagine that it'd cost perhaps $5k for a server that'd handle University of Idaho (scaling down from my university's setup). Setting it up for webmail and POP3/IMAP/SMTP access (OpenWebmail, IMP, Hula, Citadel server...) wouldn't take an unreasonable amount of time, and then the only continuing costs would be regular updates and hardware support. I think they're only saving themselves less than $5,000 per year, especially since they could ask the CS department to provide assistance.
What can the kernel do for you that an application cannot?
Seriously, this is a somewhat complicated operation, and there's little that the kernel can do to keep your data private that an application would be unable to do. Getting access to another process's memory is not a trivial task; it probably requires some trickery with the MMU, and the kernel's in the way. So you could ask for a system call to prevent this from happening, but is there anything else the kernel can do for itself that it can't do for applications?
They provided information; if the court doesn't contest that they were acting in good faith, the fines should be waived from the time that information was provided. If the information is deemed inadequate, a fine for the trouble can be levied; further, a second deadline can be set for Microsoft to comply. On the other hand, if they were not acting in good faith, a separate, more punitive fine will probably be levied, as well as a second deadline to be set.
Either way, it's unlikely that the daily penalty would be instated from 2005, and unlikely a fine as large as 1.5 billion be levied.
MS isn't going after random businesses that installed J Infringing Distribution; they would be going after the larger organizations that are the source of the infringing code (FSF, OSDL, etc). When a product is determined to infringe on an existing patent, the company isn't usually required to recall that product, nor does the USPTO demand they be destroyed. Patent violation is only an issue for creating products, not for owning them.
So if my mission-critical server happens to have Linux code on it that violates MS copyright, tough. When I next upgrade, I'll keep that in mind, but if that takes five years, so be it. I'm not producing or distributing it.
The largest problem with IBM or Oracle using their patent protections on a Linux is that other organizations do not have such protections. So I would not be able to fork their distributions safely, nor modify their utilities, nor reason that, since it's done in IBM Linux, it's safe for me to do in my projects. Goes against the whole open source philosophy rather sharply.
What were your complaints? Were they different for each document, or were there consistent errors? If the errors are consistent enough, then the next LaTeX specification should probably correct them.
For my part, all the LaTeX I've seen either looks mostly the same, or diverts from the standard appearance and looks somewhat crappy. Probably because the people coding it tried doing so with repeated local changes rather than global changes.
A book is defined by its contents, the sequential flow of text where you keep reading it from start to end. With coherent writing and good spelling. Never heard of James Joyce, I take it.
You infringed on the copyright to their object code. Whether at that point it was software is moot.
However, they would not, according to this case, get you for patent infringement if you had full permissions where you are engaging in the offending activities (for instance, creating a WMV codec using their patents, but in Hungary where their patents have no effect). Supposedly they would still not charge you if you came to the US afterward.
Which is a stronger precedent: "Microsoft and AT&T acknowledged that software patents are not valid" or "SCOTUS determined that software patents are not valid"?
AT&T is sufficiently concerned about the possibility of losing that they would rather not fight on those terms, which increase the stakes, even if they improve AT&T's chance of winning.
What about publishing logs of surveillance camera usage? Would that help?
I think it would be difficult to prevent people from tracking everything you do; it'd just take a fair bit of effort currently. All that you would prevent is casual monitoring. That may be sufficient victory for now, depending on what costs there are for full-scale surveillance, but not for the long term.
"Citizens of the Confederate states were not technically American citizens since they had seceded."
Wasn't that what the war was about? Whether secession was possible? The victors were of the opinion that it was not; therefore, the Confederate states were still part of the US, still states, and their citizens were US citizens.
Of course, Lincoln confirmed most of their fears about the overreaching rights of the federal government; Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 18,000 people without trial, and spent funds on the war without Congressional authorization. All this, with less than 40% of the popular vote.
"That particular war is most often considered to be about a triumph for human rights."
It is now. Lincoln supported the Corwin Amendment, though, which would have asserted that the US government could not interfere with state governments on the subject of slavery. (This was as late as his inauguration speech.) His later Emancipation Proclamation was issued two years into the war, though, and only affected slaves in rebelling states that had not returned to the control of the USA. Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, the counties that later formed West Virginia, and conquered portions of Louisiana were exempt.
After the war, though, Lincoln abolished slavery in the northern states as well, via the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution. This may well have been a political move to reduce enmity between the conquered states, or more likely to satisfy the hard-line Republicans of the day.
Moreover, considering Lincoln's precedents with federal powers, he may have done more to impair human rights than any other US President, even if he did help more people than he injured directly.
Richard Stallman took gcc in a different direction than the community wanted, once. The result? Egcs was founded in 1997. In 1999, it was merged back into the gcc trunk because gcc wasn't good or popular enough.
If GPL3 is unpopular enough, the same thing will happen here.
On the other hand, 1861 was just under a century and a half ago. It's more like 146 years ago. And then, the winning side suspended habeus corpus for American citizens and dealt a terrible blow to states' rights, basically blackmailed the defeated states into accepting a number of controversial amendments to the US Constitution....
It took eighty years to undo the Revolution. Not too shabby.
Why are you using rsh to transfer large files? If the overhead of encryption is too much, why not put an ftp daemon on the computer? Granted, you may have to use an ssh client as well as an ftp client, but that's a minor thing, and increases security significantly if your network contains any untrusted computers.
Though if everyone on your network is trusted, it doesn't matter.
Yes, the punishment is perhaps harsher than appropriate. However, he ended up with community service and parole. If it had been malicious, you can be sure he'd be in jail, and probably for as long as the law allows.
Then choose a kernel--a stock kernel would do best for you, most likely--and stick with it. If you really need something from a newer kernel, you can do the work for backporting, pay someone else to do it, or live without (you were before, no?).
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Not completely autonomous. If you got Dell's hardware support (let's say that they had you pop in a livecd when you call them--would solve problems with Windows as well), then that would be a major advantage. Dell doesn't much care what runs on the machines, as long as it doesn't cost them and allows them to have standardized software support.
Ethical concerns are different from security concerns, somewhat. If you can suggest a cheap way to increase security, you'll be very mildly rewarded or ignored.
Still, the requester should likely change jobs before any major security breaks occur, and not mention anything further about security.
Why do you need your clock set to the standard in order to access a server? I've seen that requirement rather often, and I can't fathom a decent reason for it. It messed me up when switching between timezones (can't log in from Seattle unless my computer's on New York time). Really, aren't relative times enough? If not, why can't the server send a packet offering a time to use in mutual dealings?
So, I'm writing a scheduler app, and I want to schedule a recurring meeting for 11am localtime. My OS gives the local time via a library call, localtime(3). So I:
- get the time for the event, currently, in localtime from the user
- find whether DST is in effect for that date and time and convert the date accordingly
- add an event entry every k * 84600 seconds, checking each time to see whether that date's DST settings have changed
- whenever the user accesses the event, convert back from UTC to localtime, paying attention to DST
Or I:
- get the time for the event, currently, in localtime from the user
- store the localtime time for the event and its recurrences, ignoring DST completely except for the marginal cases such as missing or repeated hours which I can probably ignore
- display exactly what the user gave me when the user accesses the event
The problem isn't the method of storing times, even at the hardware level (that is, if the CMOS clock uses localtime, UTC, a nonstandard epoch, or whatever). It's that Microsoft released a patch for the new DST rules very shortly before they came into effect. If the patch were in place a year ago, the effects would be minimal at worst.
Mine does the same. Spoofing MACs is quite common, but it gets the less technical users to get Windows updates at least once a semester. I'd prefer it if the scanning tool required you to turn automatic updates on, though, and if students were encouraged to use the managed Symantec client that updates its own definitions. Still, the current system is much better than nothing.
My university uses a Sun server for mail. To set mail forwarding, ssh in and run the forward_mail script (or just edit your .forward file). Took them ten minutes to create the script, ten to write the documentation. UNIX isn't defective by design, but in exchange, you have to take care of the hardware.
I imagine that it'd cost perhaps $5k for a server that'd handle University of Idaho (scaling down from my university's setup). Setting it up for webmail and POP3/IMAP/SMTP access (OpenWebmail, IMP, Hula, Citadel server...) wouldn't take an unreasonable amount of time, and then the only continuing costs would be regular updates and hardware support. I think they're only saving themselves less than $5,000 per year, especially since they could ask the CS department to provide assistance.
Yes. It's a proven business model!
What can the kernel do for you that an application cannot?
Seriously, this is a somewhat complicated operation, and there's little that the kernel can do to keep your data private that an application would be unable to do. Getting access to another process's memory is not a trivial task; it probably requires some trickery with the MMU, and the kernel's in the way. So you could ask for a system call to prevent this from happening, but is there anything else the kernel can do for itself that it can't do for applications?
They provided information; if the court doesn't contest that they were acting in good faith, the fines should be waived from the time that information was provided. If the information is deemed inadequate, a fine for the trouble can be levied; further, a second deadline can be set for Microsoft to comply. On the other hand, if they were not acting in good faith, a separate, more punitive fine will probably be levied, as well as a second deadline to be set.
Either way, it's unlikely that the daily penalty would be instated from 2005, and unlikely a fine as large as 1.5 billion be levied.
It hasn't hurt them yet.
The closest thing we have to a union in FLOSS is the FSF. It's headed by Richard Stallman. Enough said.
Suing IBM for Linux patent violations? By extension, I can sue Enterprise for using Ford cars that infringe on my patents. I'll be rich!
MS isn't going after random businesses that installed J Infringing Distribution; they would be going after the larger organizations that are the source of the infringing code (FSF, OSDL, etc). When a product is determined to infringe on an existing patent, the company isn't usually required to recall that product, nor does the USPTO demand they be destroyed. Patent violation is only an issue for creating products, not for owning them.
So if my mission-critical server happens to have Linux code on it that violates MS copyright, tough. When I next upgrade, I'll keep that in mind, but if that takes five years, so be it. I'm not producing or distributing it.
The largest problem with IBM or Oracle using their patent protections on a Linux is that other organizations do not have such protections. So I would not be able to fork their distributions safely, nor modify their utilities, nor reason that, since it's done in IBM Linux, it's safe for me to do in my projects. Goes against the whole open source philosophy rather sharply.
What were your complaints? Were they different for each document, or were there consistent errors? If the errors are consistent enough, then the next LaTeX specification should probably correct them.
For my part, all the LaTeX I've seen either looks mostly the same, or diverts from the standard appearance and looks somewhat crappy. Probably because the people coding it tried doing so with repeated local changes rather than global changes.
You infringed on the copyright to their object code. Whether at that point it was software is moot.
However, they would not, according to this case, get you for patent infringement if you had full permissions where you are engaging in the offending activities (for instance, creating a WMV codec using their patents, but in Hungary where their patents have no effect). Supposedly they would still not charge you if you came to the US afterward.
Which is a stronger precedent: "Microsoft and AT&T acknowledged that software patents are not valid" or "SCOTUS determined that software patents are not valid"?
AT&T is sufficiently concerned about the possibility of losing that they would rather not fight on those terms, which increase the stakes, even if they improve AT&T's chance of winning.
What about publishing logs of surveillance camera usage? Would that help?
I think it would be difficult to prevent people from tracking everything you do; it'd just take a fair bit of effort currently. All that you would prevent is casual monitoring. That may be sufficient victory for now, depending on what costs there are for full-scale surveillance, but not for the long term.
"Citizens of the Confederate states were not technically American citizens since they had seceded."
Wasn't that what the war was about? Whether secession was possible? The victors were of the opinion that it was not; therefore, the Confederate states were still part of the US, still states, and their citizens were US citizens.
Of course, Lincoln confirmed most of their fears about the overreaching rights of the federal government; Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 18,000 people without trial, and spent funds on the war without Congressional authorization. All this, with less than 40% of the popular vote.
"That particular war is most often considered to be about a triumph for human rights."
It is now. Lincoln supported the Corwin Amendment, though, which would have asserted that the US government could not interfere with state governments on the subject of slavery. (This was as late as his inauguration speech.) His later Emancipation Proclamation was issued two years into the war, though, and only affected slaves in rebelling states that had not returned to the control of the USA. Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, the counties that later formed West Virginia, and conquered portions of Louisiana were exempt.
After the war, though, Lincoln abolished slavery in the northern states as well, via the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution. This may well have been a political move to reduce enmity between the conquered states, or more likely to satisfy the hard-line Republicans of the day.
Moreover, considering Lincoln's precedents with federal powers, he may have done more to impair human rights than any other US President, even if he did help more people than he injured directly.
Is the FSF really that powerful?
Richard Stallman took gcc in a different direction than the community wanted, once. The result? Egcs was founded in 1997. In 1999, it was merged back into the gcc trunk because gcc wasn't good or popular enough.
If GPL3 is unpopular enough, the same thing will happen here.
On the other hand, 1861 was just under a century and a half ago. It's more like 146 years ago. And then, the winning side suspended habeus corpus for American citizens and dealt a terrible blow to states' rights, basically blackmailed the defeated states into accepting a number of controversial amendments to the US Constitution....
It took eighty years to undo the Revolution. Not too shabby.
Why are you using rsh to transfer large files? If the overhead of encryption is too much, why not put an ftp daemon on the computer? Granted, you may have to use an ssh client as well as an ftp client, but that's a minor thing, and increases security significantly if your network contains any untrusted computers.
Though if everyone on your network is trusted, it doesn't matter.
Yes, the punishment is perhaps harsher than appropriate. However, he ended up with community service and parole. If it had been malicious, you can be sure he'd be in jail, and probably for as long as the law allows.
Then choose a kernel--a stock kernel would do best for you, most likely--and stick with it. If you really need something from a newer kernel, you can do the work for backporting, pay someone else to do it, or live without (you were before, no?).